Crotus’ eyes were tracked with red. Slowly, slowly, they focused on George. “Thessalonica,” the centaur said, one thick syllable at a time, as if it had never heard the word before. Then its head went up and down. “Oh, aye, the new town.” George did not think of it as a new town, but George did not personally remember its founding, as Crotus no doubt did. The male went on, “And you, mortal, you are … ah, who you are returneth to me: the follower of the new.” The centaur looked ready to tear him to pieces for being a follower of the new. But then more memory seemed to make its way through the haze of wine. “And we are … we are in alliance. Alliance with bad against worse. A hard path, but the only one left to us.”
Without another word, Crotus squatted down on all fours (or rather, on four out of six). George scrambled onto the centaur’s back. Crotus shouted for Elatus; the other male stood nearby. Elatus squatted, too. Father Luke hurried over and mounted his unorthodox--in both the literal and theological senses of the word-- steed.
“Thessalonica!” Crotus shouted in a huge voice. “Thessalonica! The foe awaiteth. Thessalonica!”
In a moment, the whole great band of centaurs had taken up the cry, baying like so many wolves: “Thessalonica!” Down the hillside they poured, a drunken mob of supernatural creatures. Beneath Georges fundament, Crotus’ musdes heaved and rippled. The shoemaker clung to the centaur’s human torso with one hand and to Perseus’ cap with the other. If he needed to draw his sword and fight he wouldn’t be able to hold on then. He hoped--how he hoped!--it wouldn’t matter.
He looked around to see where in the band Father Luke was. Riding behind Elatus’ torso as George rode behind Crotus’, the priest made his centaur look as if it boasted two upthrust human parts rather than the standard one. George and Crotus no doubt made the same absurd picture.
“Thessalonica!” the centaurs shouted, urging one another on and, George suspected, reminding themselves where they were going.
“Hurry!” Father Luke called to them. “In the name of whatever you hold dear, hurry! The foe ariseth in his might.” He imitated the old-fashioned Greek they spoke, which made them heed him almost as if he were one of their own. George, who could not have done the same, wished he had hands free with which to applaud.
Now, despite being in among the band of centaurs, he too could feel the gathering of power to the south. He’d known that sort of feeling in the churches of Thessalonica, but the power rising here had nothing to do with the God he worshiped. Whether it was--or could be, if fully manifested--more powerful than his God, he did not know. That frightened him worse than anything. “On the way home,” he murmured, trying to reassure himself. But the way home was, as it had been, blocked by the Slavs and Avars and by the powers that had already accompanied them into this part of the world.
A shout from the front-runners among the centaurs said they’d spotted one of those powers. Peering forward over Crotus’ shoulder, George spied a Slavic wolf-demon. The creature’s howl, this once, brought no terror with it; had it burst from a human throat, it would have been an exclamation of surprise and dismay.
The wolf turned and tried to flee, as if to take news of what it had just seen back to those with more power than it possessed. Since it was heading down toward Thessalonica, the drunken centaurs ran after it. In short order, they ran over it: the whole band, or at least as many of them as its battered body happened to pass beneath. George felt it go under Crotus’ trampling, pounding hooves. With four legs on which to stand, the centaur had no trouble keeping its balance and delivering a good stomping at the same time-Once the band had passed over the wolf, George turned and looked back over his shoulder at it. It didn’t look as if it had ever been alive; far from seeming immortal, it didn’t look as if it would ever be alive again, either. He might have been wrong: things from beyond the hills he knew were often next to impossible to slay. Not many of them, though, endured what the wolf-demon had just suffered.
Before long, the centaurs came upon more wolves. A few peeled off from the main band to chase them. The wolf-demons, more used to chasing centaurs, ran away from their numbers and their ferocity, baying as they went. But a lot of the centaurs went on yelling “Thessalonica!” at the top of their lungs. For whatever reason they did it, it helped keep most of them together.
George kept looking for Vucji Pastir. The shepherd of the wolves would be a more dangerous foe than the creatures he herded. But of Vucji Pastir there was no sign. George remembered the swordwork he had done while invisible. He still did not think he had slain the demigod; to think that, on the basis of what little he knew, would have made him both more stupid and more heroic than he actually was.
Disturbed by the centaurs’ thundering hooves and by their cries, bats rose in chittering swarms. Remembering that bats had spied on Thessalonica, George shouted a warning. The centaurs were already flinging volleys of stones and branches at the creatures. They brought down a good many, and trampled them as they had trampled that first wolf. Again, George wondered if any creature, supernatural or not, could survive such treatment.
“Close now,” Father Luke called through the din the centaurs made. “When will the Slavs and Avars notice what’s bearing down on them?”
“If we’re lucky, they’ll take one look at the centaurs and run screaming,” George answered, punctuating that with a sharp “oof!” as he came down awkwardly on Crotus’ back after the male took a particularly long bound. “Of course, if we were lucky, God wouldn’t have inflicted the Slavs and Avars on us in the first place, would He? I expect we’ll have a fight on our hands.”
Bishop Eusebius would sure have droned out some pious platitudes on the topic of all mankind’s being able to live together in peace and understanding and everyone’s worshiping God--in, of course, the orthodox fashion. That would have been wonderful, except that the Slavs and Avars had no interest in peace, understanding, or, for that matter, God.
And Father Luke, unlike most clergymen of George’s acquaintance, had little use for pious platitudes: not that he wasn’t pious--far from it--but he expressed his piety more through his life than through his talk. Now he nodded, and said, “That’s what I think, too.” He looked worried again. “I hope we aren’t too late.”
Off to one side of the main band of centaurs, a scream rose in the woods. It was not the sort of scream that might have come from the throat of one of the Slavic demons or demigods: it was a simple scream of human terror. The Slavs had had men hunting in the woods since before their assault on Thessalonica, as George knew full well. No doubt Slavs still roamed the woods, trying to keep their larders full. One of the small groups of centaurs that had peeled off from the main band in pursuit of a wolf-demon must have come upon a hunter instead. By the sounds the fellow had made, he wouldn’t be making any more sounds in the near future--or in the distant future, either.
A few minutes later, a centaur let out a screech filled with both fury and pain. An arrow sprouted from the creature’s right hindmost leg. Another centaur tore the shaft out, which caused the wounded male to screech again. Its bleeding slowed as quickly as George had seen to be commonplace among immortal beings. He hoped the Slav hadn’t poisoned the arrow, as his kind were known to do. If the Slav had poisoned it, he hoped the venom was not of a sort to harm supernatural creatures.
The male centaur ran on as if not badly hurt, so George supposed the arrow was either unpoisoned or harmless to the centaur regardless of poison. He did not have long to contemplate such things, for several centaurs, both males and females, galloped in the direction from which the arrow had come. Shouts rang out, some theirs, others from a man. When they rejoined the main band, blood dappled their human arms and torsos.
Before long, as they drew nearer to the encampments of the Slavs and Avars, more and more arrows began coming their way. “Keep on!” George shouted to Crotus. “If you waste your time chasing down a few archers, you won’t get to the main body of the foe till too late.”